Dietrich Was Camelot's Other Woman

Marlene Dietrich had a peculiar effect on many of the world’s most accomplished and respected men: She turned them into bumbling adolescents. But the German screen siren, who entranced everyone from Frank Sinatra to Adlai Stevenson, enjoyed a special relationship with Ambassador Joseph Kennedy when their families summered together in the French Riviera, Cari Beauchamp writes in Vanity Fair.

While Rose Kennedy acted aloof, Dietrich told all to her husband, who had his own mistress. The bisexual actress, who loathed condoms and rejected Hitler’s overtures, saw herself in “Papa Joe,” and even bedded son JFK in the White House. “Onscreen and off, Dietrich was a chameleon who became whatever her lover or director wanted her to be,” Beauchamp says.
(More Joe Kennedy stories.)